general

Here's a story many readers would love: on the outskirts of Hiroshima, members of the victorious Allied forces look for love, for redemption, for recovery. A 17-year-old girl, caring for her terminally ill brother, and a much older British veteran, finishing his research for a book on Asia, fall in love amidst the ruins. The (still chaste) couple are then separated by her "evil" parents and they (more or less) wander the earth hoping to be reunited.

And I did love the story; it's about as old-fashioned a romance as you can find these days. But the author's prose threatens to swamp an otherwise insightful, magical book. The New York Times reviewer is kind, noting that although "Shirley Hazzard has a blithe disdain for postmodern pieties. . . . her elliptical style will quickly try the patience of all but the most devoted reader." Another reader comments here that "The dialogue and speech [are] completely inappropriate for the time. She seems to forget that this novel was not set in Victorian England."

Both these criticisms hone in on the problems I have with this book. It's not her prose style that's Victorian: Hazzard's writing is definitely modern (i.e., "elliptical"), but her narrative voice is from a previous century. She borrows Trollope's brain and writes with Joyce's pen. The result is a clinical detachment that can be intrusive and jarring: as omniscient narrator, she tends to spell out the psychological state of her characters rather than allow their actions and behaviors to speak for themselves. At times, it's like reading a New Age psychology text: "Attempts, with Rita Xavier, to deliver something of his soul always miscarried. But he returned to them--because he could not help believing in the sensibility of wounded persons. Or because he could not leave well enough alone."

A second, equally irritating fault is the character of Helen; her depiction is fiction as hagiography. Her romantic perfectionism is tiresome: I found her believable neither as an adolescent girl nor as a youth wise beyond her years. Hazzard seems intent on proving that, without miracles and martyrdom, it's difficult to make saints all that interesting.

Nevertheless, those readers who are willing to tackle the challenging prose and forgive the thin characterizations will be gratified by a stirring romance.

I really wanted to like this book--the plot framework was interesting enough. But the execution--aaargh! Hazzard's language was excruciating to read. The dialogue was so stilted and unrealistic that it made me laugh out loud sometimes. And the characters were flat and undeveloped, as other reviewers have noted--I couldn't keep Peter and Aldred straight, they were so similar. I can't imagine what the awards committee was thinking when they gave this book the National Book Award. Yeesh!

Shirley Hazzard, the celebrated authoress from Australia who obviously subscribes to the dictum of less is more, took more than 20 years to follow up her famous 1981 National Book Circle Award winning novel ("The Transit of Venus") with yet another award winner. This time, she bagged the 2003 National Book Award for fiction with "The Great Fire (GF)". While critical reviews have been ecstatic, the reading public appears to be polarised between those who adore it and those who loathe it. Me, I love it because it's right up my alley - ethereal and cerebral, yet curiously gothic. The experience is akin to one gained from staring at a great painting and imagining the lives of its subject on canvass. Turner's impressionist painting on the cover of the British paperback version is particularly resonant. Readers who draw on the immediacy of emotions for their enjoyment of a novel may find the effect of Hazzard's writing style distancing, bloodless, sometimes even unreal.

Hazzard's descriptive prose is spare, picturesque and precise, each word crystallising on the printed page like a hand picked gem. Her dialogue is terse, sometimes awkward. Nobody speaks like that, you catch yourself thinking, before you realise that maybe Hazzard never intended to capture the flow and cadence of natural speech anyway. Each word is laden with so much meaning there's almost a history behind it. GF is a challenging read but the riches within make the effort worthwhile.

The post-2WW landscape in Asia as described by Hazzard is one of utter desolation, filled with ashes from the ruins of torn lives. The burden of victory oppresses the survivors as much as death and humiliation haunts the conquered. There are no winners. Aldred and Peter, the novel's two protaganists find themselves awash and adrift, emotionally disconnected and unable to resume with any conviction the lives they left behind. Fate, as it pans out, is kinder to Aldred than to Peter. He finds courage in reaching out for an innocent love and is finally redeemed by it. Peter is jolted by a squalid encounter with sickness and disease but his act of compassion signalling an unconscious desire to rejoin the living only brings devastating consequences.

The novel's thematic coherence and rich tapestry of colours is reflected in its wondrous characterisation. Some, like the elder Driscolls - frightening in their ugliness, or the prophetic "Ginger" (Japanese POW), may not occupy much page space but they remain firmly etched in our minds long after they have disappeared from the foreground. They and the many others who make fleeting but memorable appearances are the glue that bind the story together.

"The Great Fire" is like a finely chiselled work of art whose appeal may be limited to readers of serious literature. Clearly too, Shirley Hazzard won't be everybody's cup of tea, though readers who're so inclined will find GF an intoxicating read. A gorgeous novel.